


The Lost Year

by potterwatch



Series: Like Lightning at your Fingertips [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, In the castle during the war, Light depictions of harm, Potterwatch, Resistance, Room of Requirement, The Rebellion Trio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 08:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20273119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potterwatch/pseuds/potterwatch
Summary: Neville and the Room of Requirement, during the war. Rebellions are built on hope.





	The Lost Year

**Author's Note:**

> This piece prequels the events of Like Lightning at your Fingertips, but may act as a standalone.

When the door first slips open for him, Neville thinks all his prayers have been answered. He ducks in, hears it snick closed, right at the Carrows close on his heels. In front of him is a room, large and empty. Everything he didn’t know he needed. Just large enough to be something, maybe. Everything is becoming, these days. The castle, Neville himself, the army, that was once Dumbledore’s and is now Hogwarts’, because it goes where it is needed. And now the very stones of the castle are moving to keep them safe. It is this, these small miracles, that keep him going.

He brings them all, all that he can find, all that will go. It doesn’t matter if they’re dressed in scarlet, yellow, or green; If they once sneered at him in the hall or cleared room for him on a bench. They are all the same now, wide-eyed and fearful.

Ginny comes too, of course, shepherding the younger students along with a grim look of determination. And Seamus. There is plenty of space. The room shifts with their needs, popping out tables and cots, chairs and a fireplace, and once, after Neville said he was cold, a whole pile of blankets, freshly knit.

He knows its name: requirement. But it doesn’t just give them what they require, but what they crave, too: letters from families they thought they’d lost, cups of strong tea, a plaque on the door that reads home. 

They give it their names; the sound of their laughter, sparse and tentative; the reassurance that, if ever it needs something, they will do their best to give it back.

It’s a fierce and kind magic. One Neville is glad for as he lies down to sleep admits the sound of so much breathing, rushing like waves, one he craves after a day of braving the halls, intervening when he can, watching when he cannot. They endure. All of them. As best they can.

He does not go to class, does not walk the halls unless in vigilance. The Carrows catch and tear at his skin. He endures. As best he can.

He keeps the coin on him, always, but the familiar metal never warms. Seamus says that Harry has forsaken them, but it is in a plaintive tone that says he hopes someone will disagree, and when Ginny does, loudly and adamantly, he hides a smile behind his hand. If they must believe in something, and they must, they believe in Harry Potter, who first brought them together, first showed them the room that would one day be their home.

When the Carrows catch him, finally and inevitably, it is Ginny who bandages his arm, Ginny who clears the smears of ink from his skin, mingled with his own blood. I will not lead a rebellion, must’ve sat like stones in the Carrows’ mouths, so what’s left carved into Neville’s flesh is: I will not disobey. But he does. Neville disobeys and disobeys and when he is caught he is punished for it. But there are fewer scarred students wandering the halls, fewer screams echoing down the corridors, and when Neville looks around the room of requirement, he is glad. 

The room provides bandages, and essence of Murtlap, and a fresh pillow on which he can rest his head. Who could wish for anything else? Besides the end of the war. Besides the end of suffering. Neville wishes for that, too.

When it gets bad, and it gets bad, Ginny and Seamus sit up with him in the night. The rest of the students have been pulled into restless slumber, though there was some sniffling among the sleeping bags, and now it is just the three of them, this sparse war council, pouring over the map of the castle and their list of injuries. The Carrows have taken the dungeons. The Carrows have taken the towers. The Carrows have taken the tunnels that run dark and secret beneath their feet. 

All that’s left is the room. All that’s left is this night. And then, because it is war, and the only heroes they have are each other, Ginny takes his hand on one side, and Seamus takes his hand on they other and they hold on. Neither Ginny nor Seamus have heard from Dean in three weeks. The last report of Potter came in a halting five days ago. The sparse rations the room spits out have started to grow thin. Neville doesn’t know what to do at the thought of so many hungry faces. He tightens his fingers in Ginny and Seamus’s. They hold on.

When the attack comes, and it does, Neville is ready. He is as ready as he will ever possibly be, as prepared as seventeen years of waiting for the worst to once again come will allow. The Carrows pound on the door. They send out shoots of flame. They spit curse after curse until the air is thick with acrid smoke. The door holds. But the smoke slips in through the cracks, curdling the air in the room to something unbreathable. There’s only so much the castle can do, only so much power it has. 

Neville hears everyone he holds dear in the castle begin to choke. Seamus drops to the floor beside him, clutching his throat. Smoke billows in beneath the door. Neville cannot think, he cannot breathe, but he will not allow these people to die like this. If he has promised them one thing, one thing he will let no one take away, it is hope.

These people are good and kind and flawed and so Neville slices his palm with the tip of his wand and smears his blood against the door, desperately willing the magic to hold, freely adding himself to it.

And because it is the room of requirement, where will is everything, there is the sound of something shifting. A window appears in the far wall, and through it trickles a tendril of cool, fresh air. Neville’s throat is scraped raw from the smoke. He is half blinded. It is enough.

They are enough. Ginny braces an arm against his chest as he pitches forward and vomits onto the floor. Later he will deny there was blood in it. Later he will be grateful for the chance of denial.

That night they sit up again, braced on pillows and savoring the taste of clean air, and Neville wonders how long they can go on like this. How long the younger ones can endure the fear, the older the hunger. How long until the thin and feeble magic of their small resistance burns out. They are not fighting. They are surviving. He looks to the small heads tucked in their sleeping bags. Sometimes, that is enough.

He meets Ginny’s eyes across the table, notes the way the room has produced a salve for the gash on her cheek. The air feels bruised raw. Aching with the memory of something. Hope is a feeble thing, just then in this room. Them and the castle. A rebellion so desperate Neville must sink his nails in to hold on. There is nothing but this. Nothing but each breath of air. Neville hopes and he hopes and he hopes. 

Then suddenly, there is something else, too. A buzzing. A lifting. A rush of tides turning. Neville feels air rush past his ankles, feels the lap of invisible waves. At the center of the table, the radio turns on. The room is suddenly alive with a familiar voice. Listeners, it says, welcome to Potterwatch. 

Neville holds the words, tender, in his hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me what you think!


End file.
